Personal

The Brain is wider than the Sky
The Brain is wider than the Sky
For put them side by side
The one the other will contain
With ease-and You beside
The Brain is deeper than the sea
For hold them Blue to Blue
The one the other will absorb
As Sponges Buckets do
The Brain is just the weight of God
For Heft them Pound for Pound
And they will differ if they do
As Syllable from Sound
–Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

Ready to happen

Be generous with your encouragement and frugal with your judgment. Learn to gratefully accept whatever comes, and to make positive use of whatever you have.

Give your love and your kindness just because you can. Do a little less analyzing and a lot more living.

Become skilled at quickly letting go of those things that don’t really matter anyway. Rise above the distractions and give the power of your focus to what you know is truly important.

When you stumble, go ahead and get back up. When you’re making good progress, be sincerely thankful and keep on going.

— Ralph Marston

Hi! Thanks for visiting.

I am a proud dad, busynerd, handyman, gardener, and farmer. I like to build things and I get a kick out of helping other people learn. I also like to fix up and work on old houses, particularly woodworking and electrical. When I can, I also enjoy being in nature and working on forest trails.

I used to love to ski (2003, 2006, flying), but my knees and back aren’t what they used to be.

In the 21st Century, scientists and engineers will continue to inform us regarding what we can do with our ever-expanding knowledge base, but it is our shared responsibility to decide what we should do. And deciding what we should do is the greatest responsibility we all bear as we move forward together. — Harold T. Shapiro

To do a good job of those things that we decide to do, we must eliminate all the unimportant opportunities, select from the remainder only those that we have the resources to do well, and concentrate our efforts on them. — Mike Markkula

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd. — Voltaire (1694 – 1778)

Not to be absolutely certain is, I think, one of the essential things in rationality. — Bertrand Russell, 1947 (1872 – 1970)

The empires of the future are the empires of the mind. — Sir Winston Churchill (1874 – 1965), Speech at Harvard University, September 6, 1943

The best way to predict the future is to invent it. — Alan Kay (1940 – )

If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have said a faster horse. — Henry Ford (1863 – 1947)

A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

If the atoms never swerve so as to originate some new movement that will snap the bonds of fate, the everlasting sequence of cause and effect—what is the source of the free will possessed by living things throughout the earth? — Titus Lucretius Carus (99–55 BC)

There are risks and costs to a program of action. But they are far less than the long-range risks and costs of comfortable inaction. — John F. Kennedy (1917 – 1963)

The policy of being too cautious is the greatest risk of all. — Jawaharlal Nehru (1889 – 1964)

First weigh the considerations, then take the risks. — Helmuth von Moltke (1800 – 1891)

Take calculated risks. That is quite different from being rash. — George S. Patton (1885 – 1945)

If you don’t risk anything you risk even more. — Erica Jong

There is no security on this earth, there is only opportunity. — General Douglas MacArthur (1880 – 1964)

We cannot direct the wind, but we can adjust the sails. — Bertha Calloway (1925? – )

He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his candle at mine, receives light without darkening me. — Thomas Jefferson, 1813 (1743 – 1826)

Many people would sooner die than think; In fact, they do so. — Bertrand Russell (1872 – 1970)

Men are born soft and supple; dead they are stiff and hard. Plants are born tender and pliant; dead, they are brittle and dry. Thus whoever is stiff and inflexible is a disciple of death. Whoever is soft and yielding is a disciple of life. The hard and stiff will be broken. The soft and supple will prevail. — Lao Tzu (c. 600 BC)

There are too many people, and too few human beings. — Robert Zend (1929 – 1985)

The art of living easily as to money is to pitch your scale of living one degree below your means. — Sir Henry Taylor

The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest. — Albert Einstein (1879 – 1955)

The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax. — Albert Einstein (1879 – 1955)

It’s not that I’m so smart , it’s just that I stay with problems longer. — Albert Einstein (1879 – 1955)

The safest way to double your money is to fold it over and put it in your pocket. — Kin Hubbard (1868 – 1930)

Lack of money is the root of all evil. — George Bernard Shaw (1856 – 1950)

Too much prosperity makes men greedy and desires are never controlled sufficiently to stop at the point of attainment. — Seneca (4 BC – AD 65)

Be you in what line of life you may, it will be amongst your misfortunes if you have not time properly to attend to pecuniary [monetary] matters. Want of attention to these matters has impeded the progress of science and of genius itself. — William Cobbett (1763 – 1835)

Please give me some good advice in your next letter. I promise not to follow it. — Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892 – 1950)

He who is only an athlete is too crude, too vulgar, too much a savage. He who is a scholar only is too soft. The ideal citizen is the scholar athlete, the man of thought and the man of action. — Plato

In Germany they came first for the communists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist. Then they came for me, and by that time no one was left to speak up. — Martin Niemoeller, German Lutheran pastor arrested by the Gestapo in 1937

Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure…than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in a gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.” — Theodore Roosevelt

“If you would not be forgotten, as soon as you are dead and rotten,
Either write things worth reading, or do things worth the writing.” — Benjamin Franklin

My homepage from 1999:
The following is from my homepage in 1999 (I was 23). I leave it up for nostalgia and because I suppose some of it may never change.

Characteristics:
I like to build, solve complicated problems, be creative, learn, ski, practice nun chaku, play guitar, teach, and get distracted. I get excited about software, science, philosophy, humanity, economics, hardware, music, and finance. I act with the assumption that I will live forever–not because it is true, but because of the implications it has for how I live. I believe that innovation will enable immortal sentience in the next 50 to 150 years.

Play:

Blurring the line between work and play

Here I am at home, streaming music from my website into Winamp (props to Nullsoft) with a visualization plugin. I am running on a Dell, and have hooked up the TV as a secondary concurrent monitor using an s-video cable and commercial software. The image is being captured on a CCD camera plugged into the USB port on the same machine. (This is how the open window on the larger monitor is displaying the picture as it was being taken… and repeats into pixilation) Then I used the picture in picture feature on the TV to duplicate the secondary monitor output on the top right. Convergence is fun. It seems pretty clear that we will be computing much more comfortably in the future. With comfort comes different demands for interfaces, content, and functionality.